''Papa will open his eyes wide when he hears how modern the Symphony sounds''; but then 'Papa' was the arch-conservative horn player Franz Strauss, and for all the massive impersonations of Beethoven in the outer movements (and of Brahms, perhaps, in the Andante cantabile), there is barely a hint of his son's musical future in the 19-year-old's F minor Symphony. It is hardly a work one wants to hear more than once a decade, and Denon's latest foray into rarer Strauss is unlucky enough to follow Jarvi's keener-moving, more unbuttoned recording (which made a surprisingly attractive, pre-Eulenspiegel-ish case for the scherzo—here, if anywhere, is the Strauss to come).
Wakasugi's handsome-sounding orchestra has taken a few steps forward since earlier, more essential Strauss issues—the ballets Josephslegende and Schlagobers (Denon, 6/88 and 1/90)—and the warm, dark string-playing at the start of the slow movement suggests that these might be worthier interpreters of the Brahms symphonies than Ozawa and the Saito Kinen Orchestra. The recording, too, is clean and spacious, with an especially firm and unsensational bass; a pity that the horns in the first-movement development fail to put the climactic point across of their own accord. Jarvi's bonus, the six Brentano songs of 1918, was more generous, but featured a soprano in distress. The 1883 Romanze for cello and orchestra featured here is anodyne stuff, conservative salon-music ideas strung on a line; amazing that Denon's astonishing feature of analysis-by-index points should break down its ten-minute span into no fewer than 13 sections.'